Nuclear never achieved economies of scale because of the anti nuclear crowd. The cumulative number of nuclear power plants built is a drop in the bucket compared to coal and gas plants.
I'm not sure how the anti-nuclear crowd stopped that. There was a general mismanagement and misestimstion of how much nuclear was needed. And then there was a massive amount of construction mismanagement.
Even in France, which has a very supportive population, and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they build more of the same reactor model.
Construction productivity doesn't increase like manufacturing productivity does. Nuclear's failures are, as far as I can tell, entirely the responsibility of those tasked with building it. And it's quite possible that nuclear only makes sense at a certain level of economic development, with the right level of technology, but not too much technological development such that manufacturing has completely eclipsed construction.
Go to any investor that would build nuclear, and they won't cite public opposition as the reason not to build, they will cite the construction risk.
And that's why this SMR design is being tried rather than large reactors.
> Even in France, which has a very supportive population, and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they build more of the same reactor model.
I'd be curious to learn where you got your data for this, because I have never been able to find such data. Best I could get was average cost of a plant in a "pallier".
What I can provide is building duration, which definitely goes down as more of the same model are built, but there's no guarantee that building duration and cost are equal here.
I spent years asking people who claim that France's cost were low for the data behind it to no avail, but only finally stumbled upon somebody linking to this paper in a different context:
There's another paper somewhere in my bookmarks that shows this for reactors of the same model built in the US, and maybe also France, but I'm having trouble locating it right now...
As with any single publication, it can't be taken as the revealed truth, but it's the best I have at hand.
Edit: how could I have forgotten about the infamous Loveringe, Yip, Nordgard paper! This is impressive because it does the analysis across many countries, and finds a few with cost decreases, but a dominant trend towards more expensive construction:
My personal, untested, hypothesis is that these variations have mostly to do with the general cost of labor in a country, and in particular their level of economic advancement, which establishes a floor on the value of an hour of a person's labor. Specifically, my guess is that construction is only feasible for nuclear when a country is in a magic sweet spot where labor is cheap, and technological advancement is moderate, like 1950s-70s US level. But not so advanced that labor has gotten so expensive that skilled labor like welders have more productive uses of their time.
If my theory is correct, future costs for South Korea should rise from where they were before stopping their program (in a flurry of corruption scandals, I would note. Nobody brings up South Korea as an example of successful construction anymore, instead having to resort to suggesting Rosatom should embark on a massive building spree across the globe.)
The abstract looks interesting, but I can't find it in open access. If you have access to it, what would be interesting to look at is cost evolution within a batch ("pallier" in french). Cost of newer batches compared to older batches isn't really relevant, as France progressively moved from 900MW reactors to 1450MW ones. Newer batches were also notably smaller, leaving less room for design improvement or cost optimization.
